Faded Hopes Pinned To A Bulletin Board

MEXICO CITY — The pictures are curling at the edges in the warm sun, the scribbled descriptions are fading and the crowds of people who come to see them have fallen to just a desperate few.

Thursday marks a week after the first of two massive earthquakes jolted this teeming city of 18 million people. There have been 4,596 confirmed deaths, at least 11,000 people are missing, and the survivors` search for missing loved ones has become a nearly hopeless quest.

The front door of the Mexican Red Cross headquarters has become a repository of those last hopes.

union identification card. Each is lettered with a plea for information and a telephone number. There are nearly a hundred more like them on the glass facade.

This is a bulletin board where people post pictures of their missing relatives, and the Red Cross puts up what information it has on unidentified victims hoping the right person will come by.

Oscar Vega Solis pinned his last hopes of finding his cousin on a trip to that doorway Wednesday. Slowly he and his brother worked their way through the pictures and the descriptions looking for some news of Jose Juan Solis Valden, 28.

``He got to Mexico City a week ago today,`` Vega said. ``He called us from his hotel that night and said he would come to dinner the next day.``

But at 7:18 the next morning the Hotel Finisterry, where the cousin was staying in room 309, collapsed during the first jolts of the quake.

``That call was the last time we heard from him,`` Vega said.

Since then 15 members of their family have worked day and night to find word of their relative. They have toured dozens of hospitals and morgues, have visited shelters and even walked the streets in hope of finding him on a park bench.

``They (police) won`t let us near the hotel, we can`t even talk to the workers there who might have seen something,`` Vega said. ``Now they are tearing these buildings down without stopping to look for people.

``We may never know if he is alive or dead, or if he just can`t talk and is lost.``

Vega`s story is similar to thousands of others in this city. Demolition experts have started wiring buildings to be brought down, and wrecking balls are being swung with more abandon and less care for the possibility of survivors underneath rubble.

The last bodies that were piled in a downtown baseball stadium for identification were carted off to crematoria Wednesday. The stench of death lingered amid the empty seats. The outfield was littered with lime and empty body bags. For those 300 people, the chance to have their passing noted was gone.

Even the dogs trained to sniff out humans buried beneath buildings have grown tired of their work. Their handlers say that after seven days the dogs have tended to lose their will to go on with the search.

There are still a few signs of hope. An infant and a woman were pulled alive Thursday from the rubble of a hospital.

A few more miracles might remain, but there is a growing despair in this city where people are coming to accept the fact that the chances of finding more survivors are all but gone.

``The saddest aspect is that within a few hours our hopes of being able to pull people out alive will have vanished,`` said U.S. Ambassador John Gavin.

For survivors who want to call U.S. relatives, Mexican authorities finally opened telephone lines Wednesday to Chicago and eight other U.S. cities with large Mexican populations. It is still not possible for people in the U.S. to phone Mexico.